Hawking 75 Speakers

Professor Brian Cox

Professor Brian Cox

Brian Cox began his career in physics while keyboards player with the bands Dare and D:Ream, taking a degree at the University of Manchester and a PhD at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. He has worked at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and in 2009 was appointed Professor of Particle Physics. Brian has become one of the UK's best-known scientists and has received many awards for his efforts to publicise science, especially since his TV series Wonders of the Solar System in 2010. He has since gone on to present Wonders of the Universe, Wonders of Life, Human Universe and Forces of Nature. His books include Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?) and The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, both written in collaboration with Jeff Forshaw.




Professor Gabriela González

Professor Gabriela González

A native of Córdoba, Argentina, Gabriela González is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University. Her research is in the detection of gravitational waves with interferometric detectors, and she was a founding member of the LIGO i Scientific Collaboration. In 2011 she was elected as LIGO's spokesperson and in February 2016 was one of four LIGO scientists to announce to the world the detection of gravitational waves, a truly monumental scientific discovery and one which opens up a whole new way of studying the universe.


 

 


Professor Martin Rees

Lord Rees of Ludlow

Lord Rees was a student of the late Dennis Sciama who also supervised Stephen Hawking. He is currently Astronomer Royal and was formerly Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was President of the Royal Society from 2005-10. Martin has received many honours for his contributions to relativistic astrophysics, black holes and cosmology. One of his most noted achievements was his realization that the power house of quasars is a massive rotating black hole accreting dust and gas and emitting enormous collimated radio beams stretching across the sky. In addition to his technical scientific work, Martin is well known as a popularizer of science, especially astronomy, and he has been very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author of a number of popular books on science, including Before the Beginning, Just Six Numbers and Our Cosmic Habitat.



Professor Stephen Hawking

Professor Stephen Hawking

Born in 1942, Stephen Hawking completed his first degree at Oxford, before doing a PhD at Cambridge under the late Dennis Sciama. After gaining his PhD he became first a Research Fellow and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), and held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009. The Lucasian Professorship was founded in 1663 and then held from 1669 by Isaac Newton. Stephen Hawking is currently the Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, at DAMTP in Cambridge. He has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied that space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. In 2016 he was recognised with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Basic Sciences, jointly with Professor Viatcheslav Mukhanov. In 2017 he was awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. His many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell and The Grand Design.

 

Principia mundi et mathematicae consentientia et obseruatione probanda